Elizabeth Gilbert is out with an ambitious new memoir -- a tale of pain, depression and personal redemption that has received the blessings of Oprah Winfrey. Sound familiar?

Gilbert's spiritual search across exotic lands that begin with the letter "I" concludes with quite a storybook ending, and we all know about storybook endings.

Fact or fiction? Now let me start out by saying that I have no evidence that Gilbert wove any fiction into her nonfiction. She certainly is a better writer than James Frey, whose embellishments in his best-selling memoir, "A Million Little Pieces," sparked a media feeding frenzy and a national debate over the rules governing our memory and our memoirs.

Frey's sparse yet powerful story of addiction and redemption found its way into the Oprah Book Club, which is any writer's dream. O, the Oprah Winfrey Magazine, plans a 6,000-word excerpt from Gilbert's memoir in its March issue.

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Let's hope the similarities stop there.

Gilbert's book is her version of her adventures during a yearlong pilgrimage to Italy, India and Indonesia. She decides in advance that Italy represents pleasure, India stands for prayer and Indonesia is all about love. She will spend four months in each nation and discover a new balance between worldly pleasure and spiritual devotion.

She leaves after a messy divorce that left her depressed and paralyzed with guilt, so she decides to remain chaste through her journey of self-discovery. Gilbert is 34 when she departs on the pilgrimage. She has already revealed a certain lust for life, so there's something a bit fishy from the get-go about this celibacy business. Liz makes it through Italy without having sex. There are some close calls, but she manages to sublimate her erotic urges with luscious bowls of steaming pasta. But this gal is one horny celibate. She gains 33 pounds in four months. Her time in India was less caloric and mostly passed at an ashram led by a female guru Gilbert refuses to name. (My guess is her secret spiritual master is Gurumayi Chidvilasananda, the successor to the controversial yet still revered Siddha Yoga leader, Swami Muktananda, who died in 1982.)

"Eat, Pray, Love" consists of 108 anecdotes from Gilbert's year abroad, evenly divided into 36 vignettes drawn from three lands she loves. The organization of the book -- a nod to the allegedly mystical properties of the number 108 -- makes it easy to digest but somewhat disjointed. It's not always clear what life lessons she or we are supposed to glean from the characters she encounters and the experiences she has along the way.

Gilbert's writing is chatty and deep, confident and self-deprecating. She's a quick study and doesn't worry about leading readers down uncharted paths. That makes her work engaging and accessible but sometimes gets her and the rest of us lost in space.

The book bogs down in India. It takes Gilbert nearly 200 pages to find God, or at least enlightenment. And, of course, it happens in India. "I left my body, I left the room, I left the planet, I stepped through time and I entered the void. I was inside the void, but I also was the void and I was looking at the void, all at the same time." She confesses that she is attempting to describe the indescribable. She's right about that. We've heard all those words before. I was more moved by Gilbert's description of her quick trip back to the mundane:

"This return of useless longing was bringing me back again into my own small borders, my own mortal confines, my limited comic-strip world," she writes. "I watched my ego return the way you watch a Polaroid photo develop, instant-by-instant getting clearer -- there's the face, there are the lines around the mouth, there are the eyebrows -- yes, now it is finished: there is a picture of regular old me."

Next stop: Indonesia.

Well, not really Indonesia.

Next stop: Bali, the Hindu enclave that resembles the rest of Muslim Indonesia about as much as San Francisco stands for the United States.

But Gilbert was there long enough to pass through the familiar, altered states of Balinese wonderment and get her taste of the corruption and lethargy that also inhabit that kind and beautiful island.

Gilbert's travelogue through this holy trinity designates Bali as the place for love.

Now, as Pope Benedict XVI points out in his recent encyclical, there are many kinds of love. There's eros. There's agape. Then there's good old lust.

Gilbert finally gets bored with her indigenous Balinese medicine man and medicine woman and starts hanging with the Brits, Yanks and others in the expatriate crowd. Here the spirits are alcoholic and love is not of God. She meets a handsome, older Brazilian Prince Charming intent on sweeping this girl off her feet and into his mosquito netting.

Celibacy is tested on their first real date, and Gilbert does not break her vow. She comes close, very close, but she does not have sex with that man. On that night.

No, I'm not going to spoil the ending, which is fantastic. All I can say is that it is a storybook ending. Let's just hope it's true.